BACKGROUND

We need an outstanding candidate excited about novel approaches for the metagenomics data analysis.

Our group, together with MetaSUB (www.metasub.org) consortium partners, develops and standardize the analysis methods and approaches for metagenomics samples from subway and urban biomes in order to assess the biodiversity and to build a molecular portrait of cities.

RESPONSIBILITIES

You will be responsible for the development of novel approaches in the deep bioinformatics analysis of metagenomics data sets from MetaSUB related projects. You will be responsible for applying and adapting existing systems as well as developing novel components as needed.

REQUIREMENTS and PREFERENCES:

Doctoral degree/PhD in bioinformatics, computer science or (computational) biology, or any related field of life sciences

Strong expertise in programming in: R, PERL, python, C/C++; knowledge about Linux environment on the administrator and programmer level; knowledge about version control systems: svn, git

Experience in (bio)statistics as well as machine learning methods

Basic knowledge about molecular biology, especially metagenomics

A plus will be proof of eventual earlier scientific work.

Excellent written and oral communication skills in English (essential)

Abilities to work unsupervised and have good organization skills

COMPENSATION

Salary will be commensurate with experience.

ABOUT US

Bioinformatics Research Group at MCB, Jagiellonian University Krakow, Poland (www.mcb.uj.edu.pl/bioinformatyka):
We are interested in pushing the state of the art in functional genomics, aiming to elucidate the role of the thousands of genes and gene products that are still not exhaustively characterized. A key source of information about the function of a gene is when, where, and how strongly it is being expressed. The most common studies are actually looking for differential expression: differences in expression between different samples or states. This is fortunate, as some of our recent work has shown that such comparative studies are much more robust to technical platform effects. Quantitative measurements are of course directly subject to bias and noise. When novel technologies emerge, the characterization of their measurement bias and noise, as well as the subsequent reduction of the effects of these becomes a critical prerequisite to meaningful reproducible results. With our collaborators we have made key contributions to the first systematic study of the power and limitations of RNA-seq within the US FDA MAQC-III/SEQC consortium. We continue this work, among others, in follow up SEQC2 project.

Another area of our interest is to study the microbial ecosystems of built-up environments in order to build a molecular portrait of cities. To achieve this ambitious goal we collaborate with groups from all over the world within the MetaSUB International Consortium (www.metasub.org).